Sheldon Adelson Winning Israel's Newspaper War

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"About five years ago, Sheldon Adelson, the American billionaire casino mogul, major backer of Republican candidates in last year's U.S. election and 14th richest person in the world, began to completely upend the Israeli newspaper market.

Saying he wanted to bring a "fair and balanced" approach to Israel, in 2007 he launched Israel HaYom (Israel Today), a free daily tabloid that initially only published on weekdays. But soon it was publishing seven days a week and challenging every paper in the Israeli market for readership and ad dollars.

In January, a bi-annual media survey announced that Israel HaYom is the most widely read daily, for the third year running.

The paper, which is run at a loss, has been criticized for aligning itself too closely with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies. It was reported last year that one of its columnists was actually on the prime minister's payroll as a speechwriter and consultant.

It also serves as a platform from which Adelson can project his rejection of the two-state solution. A Jan. 2 opinion piece in the paper calls the idea of a peace process "fantasy" and goes on to say that "No one is buying this used up, worn out merchandise, for which many in Israel have already paid a very high price."

5. With a pen?

6. When the entire fecking world is against *you*, there's reason to cry.

When the entire world gangs up as one united nations to persecute *you*, to single *you* out from all the others for particular grievances, it's proof that the whole world is now and always has been against *you*. It's the ultimate conspiracy. When the world recognized the horrors of WW1 and WW2 as starting a series that must not be continued, and set their best minds to write internationally recognized conventions of humanitarian law that even *you* agreed to as a condition for joining that world body, it was just so they could use that law to unfairly single *you* out as a nation to which that law was applicable, to discriminate against *you*, because the whole world is against *you*.

7. So when you say *you* what do you mean by that.

8. Sometimes I think the world gangs up against *everybody* or *every nation*

in all different coalitions. That's the nature of the thing. For which reason there have to be agreed on rules of conduct. We know this is true in some never-never place that rarely sees reality, and even then only selectively.

Craziness comes home when individuals or groups think the rules shouldn't apply to them because their idea, their god or whatever, supersedes all generally agreed upon norms. By this I mean to indict, especially, people like al-zawahiri and the groups that coalesce around his ideas. I think Bennett, in a clean-cut western middle class way, is of the same kind. And likewise the american neocons led by Cheney et al are certainly crazy just like that.

By "crazy" I mean that they aren't going to listen to a reasoned view that opposes their program.

I don't think the US would ever agree to allow itself to be prosecuted before the ICC, for anything - as much as the US is gung ho to prosecute others. I don't think the US or Israel are alone - why would any "winner" allow such a thing? Seems to me that history shows that winners try losers before their courts, in large part as a feel good thing. And I think the winners, the general population right up to almost the 99th percentile, drink the kool aid - even when their noses are pushed into the facts.